


not going to behave

by x (ordinary)



Series: savages fit for a wasteland [2]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 06:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5365178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ordinary/pseuds/x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Minutemen find her and Felicia tries to remember how to be a person. She fails, and slinks off to Goodneighbor to find herself a new home, one that might not mind her proclivities.</p>
<p>There, an obsession is born.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not going to behave

**Author's Note:**

> yet more backstory BUT the last one probably!

Covered in gore, Felicia heaved a sigh of relief as the last raider fell, lowering her gun. From the second floor's railing, Preston looked at her, his face inscrutable, before beckoning her upstairs. She obeyed, not out of loyalty but because there was  _more to do_ , and when it came to the duty of doling out death, Felicia left no stone unturned.

"Please," he said, even as Felicia kept her finger on the trigger, kept the gasmask on, kept her hackles up. "We need you to do this. We need your help."  In what would become uncomfortably too familiar as time went on, Preston Garvey looked at her with hope in his eyes, hanging it up high on her laurels against her will. 

Why would anyone trust her? Why would anyone want her near them after witnessing first hand the carnage she created with a laugh and a smile? 

A fucking idiot, that's who, and yet Felicia hesitated. "I'll help," she said, and her voice was almost rusty from disuse, from three months spent in self-inflicted isolation. In that moment,  Felicia hung up the gas mask for the sake of a greater good. She pulled it up to reveal her own face, scarred and gaunt as it was. It was a human face but Felicia didn't feel at home in it, and when Preston smiled at her, all she had to offer was a grimace.

"Don't get too fucking cocky," she snapped, rifling through drawers and swiping items off of desks, taking anything of use like any scavenger would. "It's just until I get what I need from you. Some fucking stability, all right?"

Preston just smiled, shoulders sagging in relief. 

* * *

 

Sooner or later, Preston was going to regret enlisting a wild animal, and it seemed that regretted some of the others already had. Within the week, Felicia heard her name whispered from afar, two settlers whispering to each other on the far side of Sanctuary. The words "wild animal" and "wide berth" were bandied, along with "lashes out" and "vicious".

They're right, of course. Felicia's hostility was swiftly renowned, but what did any of them expect?

She picked up a hammer from her workbench and tested the heft of it in her palm. She looked to them, measuring exactly how hard she'd have to throw the thing to take out their eye, how hard she'd need to swing to shatter their jaw, what angle she'd need to use if she wanted to break four of their ribs at once. But she did not, and instead channeled her fury into a new set of bracers, the clanging of metal covering up her snarl.  _This act wasn't working_. The urge to salt and burn the damned neighborhood and everyone inside it rose with every passing day, an impatience bubbling up inside her.

Felicia stood, thinking better of her restraint, and turned to fling the tool just so, metal head cracking against their kneecap with a satisfying  _crunch_.

It wouldn't do to let them forget who the _fuck_ was in charge.

* * *

 

Preston's goals didn't dawn on her until he sent her out to mind three settlements at once.

Each one of them was plagued by different monsters, and each one of them were far away. It took her days to find and clear them all, slogging through the Commonwealth and working out her fury on anything that she stumbled across, limbs loosening in the process. She was back in her element of unadulterated destruction, where ruination was the optimal answer. 

On the tail end of her Psychojet high, Felicia crawled into a deceased raider's bed,  still stinking of spilled blood. And as she did, realization hit her like a freight train, and Felicia had never felt so idiotic. Preston wasn't _ignorant_ of what she was at all. He'd seen her in action and assessed her worth right then and there, and decided that wanted her on  _his_ side, feral or not. And while he wanted to expand his little happy paradise, a ll of Preston's jobs involved a _whole lot_ of killing. The force of nature was on  _his_  side, now, and when that force of nature got pissy, he sent her out to places where she could safely work out her excessively cruelty, kindly looking the other way.

 

Felicia laughed as she settled in to sleep, sliding her pistol beneath the straw pillow, one finger still on the trigger. Preston was a pretty good guy-- a _really_ good guy-- but who knew he could be a little pragmatic, too? At least it  explained how he'd managed to survive for so long.

She brought him back a bag of fresh fruit and vegetables as her thank you, dumping them unceremoniously onto his desk. "You can plant them," Felicia said, giving him a wary but knowing look. Before he could say anything, Felicia leaned forward to jab a finger into his chest. "Don't make me regret this shit." 

And then she was gone, slamming the door to his metal home behind her. Felicia sneered at Carla's cool stare as she bee-lined for the place where her loose ends had gone to die. "Sturges!" she barked, beckoning to him from across the street. "Drop whatever the fuck it is you're working on and c'mere. Got shit for you to do."

The guy grimaced, and if Felicia were a more sympathetic sort, she'd feel bad for him. As it was, she just tapped her foot impatiently, standing outside the doorway of what had once been _home_.

"What can I do you for?" he asked, cautious, hands tucked into his pockets to keep them from fidgeting.

Felicia rolled her eyes. "Inside. Now." She walked the perimeter of the place, remembering the idyllic little life that she'd hated so much. She caressed its walls without any nostalgia at all, inspecting the room with a cold disinterest.

"Take it all," she said, baring her teeth at him. "We can probably scrap most of it. Need more turrets anyway." None of the stuff was hers to keep. It was a stranger's things, not her own. "And if it doesn't have any use, get rid of it. We don't need the trash."

Sturges didn't say anything for a second, looking at the upturned chairs and fallen picture frames, brows knitted, trying to fill in the pieces of a puzzle that wasn't his to assemble. Felicia smacked him upside the head with a sharpness in the motion, cruel. " _Do you understand?_ "

He recoiled, a muscle working tightly in his jaw and Felicia could tell that he wanted to return the blow. She might have respected him more if he had. "Yes," Sturges bit out, turning away. "Is that all?"

Without an answer, she turned on her heel to step back out onto the streets of Sanctuary, heaving a sigh of relief. Felicia wasn't sure why she even  pretended to be normal, because it slipped so often it was hardly worth the energy. Preston caught her gaze and she turned away, going to fetch her gun. 

She didn't want to be known as the the sole survivor, a vault dweller who could help people with all their problems. She  didn't want to be known as anything at all. 

So she ran.

* * *

 

Felicia went towards Goodneighbor because it sounded like her kind of town. Rumor had it that it was a haven for thieves and murderers, with a healthy dash of chem sellers on the side. All things considered, it was a surefire way to make her want to visit, if not make it her hope. She'd loped towards it back in her old gear, the gear she'd worn when indiscriminately tearing through everything that moved with bullets and a knife. 

Outside its gates, though, Felicia hesitated. What if the rumors weren't true? What if Goodneighbor wasn't anything like she'd been told?

In an abandoned building, she stripped out of her rags and set them back inside her bag, rolled up tight, right next to her gasmask. She zipped into the vault suit reading 111 on the back, buckling her armor back on. With her face exposed, Felicia could be someone else, at least for a little while. There were no people to disappoint, here, only dangerous people that needed to think her unassuming. To think of her as anything but a threat. The malice in her posture slipped away, and her empty eyes start to dart. To the naked eye, she is feral, not ferocious, wearing every call sign of prey in the book.

With her her identity of monster abandoned, she entered.

Not two seconds passed before some fuck took note of her skittish look, grinning in the way that all sleazy men did. His name was Finn and he was eager to carve out a place for himself between the bones of her ribs.

"Hey," he said, lighting up a cigarette, "First time in Goodneighbor? Can't go walking around without insurance."

Felicia closed her eyes and sucked in a deep breath, and all that attempting to be small proved to be useless. She managed not to snap her jaws at him like the wild thing she is. Instead, she reached for her gun, just in case. The thirst and fury in her awakened like a match dropped onto a pile of gasoline soaked kindling. "You better back off," she said, wishing he'd try something for the excuse to end him, "or _you're_ the one that's going to need insurance."

The thug acquiesced, so Felicia dropped her hand, the fight fading out of her as fast as it had set on-- but it turns out, she didn't have to worry to begin with. Someone was already there to act on her behalf, strolling out of the shadows to talk some sense into the guy named Finn, easy as you please.

In those moments her first impressions of Hancock were formed. He was a ghoul, dressed in a costume ridiculous and yet still somehow the mayor. He was all swagger and even more charm, and came served with-- and with this came a fluttering in Felicia's chest-- a side of repeated stabbings. The world narrowed in around him, her vision turning to one dark tunnel with Hancock as the light at the end of it.  Tha-thump tha-thump went her heart, and all the bloodlust in her past and future faded into something _new_.Hancock greeted her kindly with blood still on his boots and a corpse at his feet, one made that way for good intentions. For her sake. For her good health. For proving a  _point._

Starstruck, Felicia's gaze slid up his body with an appreciative awe, words catching in her throat. She hardly remembered the words that tumbled out of her mouth, the moments that followed nothing but a blur. As Hancock finally turned his back on her and took his leave, it took Felicia an enormous amount of self-control to resist trailing after him, to grab him by the arm and  _yank_ , demanding he answer her thousand questions about him.

Instead, she stumbled down to depths of The Third Rail and ordered herself a vodka double. She chased her pounding headache and still pounding heart away with its burn, eyes boring into the wooden counter of the bar. She was _curious_ , and it had so long that she'd almost forgotten the feel of it. The all-consuming hunger. The endless desire for more. The wonder and admiration of the unknown.

Felicia ordered another shot and tried to think of the last time she'd consciously taken something apart for the sake of learning more about it, and not just because it would lead to her continued survival.  The scary thing was that she couldn't remember at all, and that marked her newfound obsession as dangerous. Already, Felicia wanted to cut him open from sternum to groin and fish out the reasons of his how and why, of his power in a position of authority and how he chose to wield it, of why he clothed himself to project another self. They were all questions Felicia wanted to know about _herself_ , too.

He was dangerous and Felicia wanted to see him in action again, and either way, it cemented the fact that she was going to stay. Felicia wouldn't be able to rest rest until she got a chance to disassemble him from the outside in.

Felicia threw back her final drink slamming the glass so hard against the counter that it shattered. The wild look in her eyes wore now was anything but an act.

What the fuck was she going to _do_.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, you can catch me at [my tumblr](http://lurks-beneath.me) :)


End file.
